Dear Stanford,

Do something today that you did not do yesterday. This is what Cory Booker asked of America as he stood on the Senate floor for 25 hours, reminding us of what we owe each other: decency, respect and love. I asked myself, what can I do that I have not done before? Over the past few months, I have felt such overwhelming isolation in the grief and lack of leadership in our nation. I know I’m not alone in this feeling. My peers have expressed fear of repercussions for organizing and attending rallies. Our international and undocumented communities face real danger. This fear is the articulation of distrust in the Stanford administration, Stanford’s Department of Public Safety and each other. To give every student a sense of security to exercise their constitutional rights, our whole community must gather to protect each other and build trust. When I ask myself what I can do today that I did not do before, I ask my community to come together, to fight together and to heal together. One thing I am sure of is that our communities are our strength: my classmates, my neighbors and my professors. 

We are faced not with an issue of partisanship, but a moral dilemma that threatens our fundamental rights. Such conditions demand a powerful and sacred American tradition: exercising our right to assembly, gathering as a community, peacefully protesting injustice and working to heal together. James Baldwin wrote, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” If there has ever been a time in our lives to look critically at our government, our communities and ourselves, now is the time. 

I urge you to turn the defeat and discouragement you may be feeling into outrage and that outrage into action. I urge you to ask yourself, “What will I do to stand for our America?” — to stand for fellow university students who have been deported and detained without due process, for veterans who have had their health care and benefits threatened, scientists who had their vital research grants censored, for the patients whose life saving treatments were disrupted due to the withdrawal of federal financial support, for the men and women who have lost their federal jobs without warning, for the farmers and families who face higher costs from tariffs, for the public lands whose protections have been threatened, and for communities across the world who have suffered due to the withdrawal of American aid.

Watching alum Senator Cory Booker break the shameful record of Strom Thurmond for the longest senate speech, I was proud to be a Stanford student. Thurmond opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Booker, the first Black senator from New Jersey, stood for 25 hours to fight for our rights and remind us of the power we hold as individual citizens to enact change. Shortly after, the state of Wisconsin showed the world that our votes are not for sale, that our voices have more value than any billionaire’s check and that the people have power. Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us that in times like these, “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.” Please, do not be silent.

Senator Booker evoked Judge Learned Hand’s 1944 speech, “The Spirit of Liberty,” which says, “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it… A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.”

We invite you to join the Hands Off protest in San Francisco on Saturday, April 5. Stand against the injustices that are taking place across our nation. We will be holding a pancake breakfast at the Stanford Oval at 9 a.m. and will depart from there to the Caltrain at 10:30 a.m. The protest will be from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at the Civic Center Plaza in San Francisco.

If you are planning to join us, please RSVP using this link: https://forms.gle/DTLLss1CLGsNd5ck7

For more information, visit the Hands Off March website here: https://indivisiblesf.org/hands-off

With hope and love,

Leela Mahajan

Leela Mahajan ’25 is a human biology major with a concentration in cellular and molecular immunology.